“We’re thrilled to extend our digital marketing offerings into the cosmetic services space,” said David Kocher, chief customer officer at RevenueWell, which acquired PBHS is 2021. “Our mission has always been to equip practices with the tools they need to drive results and growth, and now we’re extending that same commitment to new verticals including cosmetic surgery, dermatology, and medical spa professionals. By formally expanding on our existing capabilities in SEO, social media, paid media, and websites to more cosmetic services customers, we’re enabling these practices to enhance patient acquisition and retention while building their brand presence. This expansion helps streamline marketing efforts, so providers can focus on delivering exceptional care, growing their practice, and elevating their reputation in an increasingly competitive landscape.” 

According to a press release from the company, the digital marketing solutions from PBHS will provide cosmetic clients access to professionally designed, high-performing websites that help turn visitors into patients. In addition, PBHS reportedly will also focus on providing optimized SEO strategies, targeted advertising services through Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising on search engines and Meta ads, combined with social media content creation and management, to foster authentic patient relationships and build brand awareness. 

Photo: ID 138534565 @ Pop Nukoonrat | Dreamstime.com

Millennials and Gen Z are using social media like TikTok for more than viral dance videos but for career planning, news, culture, values, and information, according to new data from The Harris Poll Thought Leadership Practice.

The study also shows that while they look for their friends on Instagram, they only trust some things they see.

The Harris Poll Thought Leadership Practice designs creative research for leading brands, allowing them to address cultural trends proactively. The new project examines changing societal values and how they play out in social media.

“If you think TikTok is just about viral dances, you’d be mistaken. Young people are turning to it for deeper purposes, like gathering information, building community, and cultivating equity,” said Abbey Lunney, co-founder of The Harris Poll Thought Leadership Practice. “We see a giant shift happening in social media away from surface-level likes, hyper-edited photos towards spaces for authenticity and discovery.”

The group’s study identifies 5 shifts in social media, with a central theme of Gen Z and Millennials wanting something tangible from their online interactions.

• Gen Z Aren’t Looking for Friend Updates, They Are Leaning Into The Algorithm. Gen Z doesn’t turn to social media to see updates from their friends; instead, they turn to social media to be informed, entertained, and direct messages. For example, Gen Z says their feed is filled mostly with personalized content that the platform thinks I’ll like (62%), and a majority agree that algorithms have increased the content they want to consume and be entertained by (65%). This is in contrast to Baby Boomers and Gen X, whose social media feeds consist mainly of updates from friends/people they follow (66% and 57%, respectively).
• TikTok is the new Google. For Gen Z, TikTok is the center of gravity regarding search and education. TikTok is the first platform Gen Z uses to search for culturally relevant content (34%), beating YouTube (24%), Google (19%), and Instagram (17%). This is in contrast to older generations, including Millennials, where Google continues to be the first platform users turn towards (Boomers 57%, Gen X 47%, Millennials 40%).
• TikTok is an Undercover Learning Engine. Most of Gen Z reports regularly turning to TikTok to learn something (63%). The things they are learning about go beyond food, fashion, and music to include career planning (37%), small/local business (36%), politics (28%), social structures/DEI (27%), and even STEM categories (20%). This is critical as 81% of Gen Z and Millennials say that ongoing education is core to their ability to create financial stability.
• Reality, not superficiality. Four out of five (80%) Gen Zers and Millennials believe most lifestyles on social media are fake or overly perfected, and almost three-quarters (73%) would like to see proof that people are living the way they claim on social media. Large shares of those generations want social media to validate the information shared on its platforms (39%) and don’t want filtered images and content on social media (24%).
• Social media isn’t just youth culture, it’s all culture. Among Americans of all ages, 85% say social media isn’t just for young people. Moreover, 78% of Gen Z and Millennials say they have learned a lot from content created by people older than them. A surprising two-thirds (66%) of Gen Z and Millennials say they love watching videos of senior citizens.

The study also offers insight into the reasons behind these shifts in values. Pressure from those concerns, Lunney said, is creating distinct generational values, and for Gen Z and Millennials, it influences how they navigate the future:

• Learning as a source of stability. They believe ongoing education is central to their ability to have financial security.
• Fluidity as a source of expression, and more than three out of four (77%) say being able to express different versions of themselves is essential.
• Equity as a source of growth. They believe racial and gender equity helps individual, economic, and societal growth (Gen Z, 78%; Millennials, 82%).

The desire to create and utilize these services, Lunney said, will drive the internet toward a more 3D and immersive environment. Three-quarters of Gen Z and Millennials expect the future of art to be assisted and accelerated by artificial intelligence, and 67% are interested in using AI creative-based tools.

The Harris Poll Thought Leadership Practice believes there will be a change to everything from advertisements to immersive search and online personas.

“Today’s stacked crises are creating movement toward changing generational values,” said Lunney. “Today it’s rewiring social. Tomorrow, it’s redefining social.”

Photo 197039996 © Irinayeryomina | Dreamstime.com

As Andrea Smith, founder of Smith Social Company, put it in a press release, “By far, the most common problem we come across in physician media marketing is that offices don’t want to invest in the cost of a full done-for-you package, but also need help and assistance with their social media to help their practice grow. Or, they’ve been burned by an agency and are nervous to get involved with one again.” 

Described as a “middle ground solution,” this 3-month beta program provides participants with 30 story templates per month, 30 post graphics per month, and 30 caption templates per month. In addition, they will receive one blog template per month and reel content ideas with current trending audio. 

Participants will also have access to social media training, which includes topics such as SEO, email marketing, blog writing, analytics, graphic design, and copywriting. Smith Social Company will provide a monthly content calendar that outlines exactly what program participants should be posting, as well as information on how and why they are posting. 

Plastic surgery practices that sign up for the beta program will also have support from the company’s team, which includes a Master’s level graphic designer, copywriter, and strategist, plus the practice’s account manager. 

The company is offering a free social media audit to those practices that call to discuss being apart of the beta program. 

According to the company, pricing is $697 per month for the beta launch and will be $997 per month for the official launch. 

Implementing a social media strategy is one of the best investments you can make in your plastic surgery practice, but before you invest in a social media campaign on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, you need to know what it will cost so you can track your return on investment (ROI).

Social Media is a Part-Time Position 

Correctly managing social media means posting consistently (at least three times a week). And it takes a skill set that includes strategy development, copywriting, graphic design, video editing, posting, and finally, community management of comments and messages. It takes a significant amount of time, strategy, and research to do social media right, and it should not be something someone’s doing off the side of their desk. You’ll need a specialized social media agency or a dedicated employee to handle it for you. 

Determine the Cost of Social Media 

To determine the cost of your social media campaign, you need to know the annual fee for hiring a social media agency. If you keep your social media in-house, you’ll need to know what you are spending on the salary and benefits of the person who is running it. That person must dedicate between one quarter to one half of a full-time position solely to social media. So, take their salary and benefits cost and divide it by either by four or two to determine the annual dollar amount it will cost you to run a social media campaign. It could easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. It’s an investment. But it will pay dividends if done correctly. 

Consider ROI

Practices often wonder how much they should budget for social media marketing. This is where it is important to consider the return on investment (ROI). In general, it is helpful to calculate your average annual revenue from one patient. Then determine how many patients your social media campaign needs to bring in annually to more than pay for itself. A professional social media campaign should turn a profit for your practice.

Know Where Your Patients Come From

Add to the new patient intake process a question that asks them where they heard about you. That way you can determine and track how many patients are coming to you through your social media campaign.

Focus on Video 

A high-return strategy this year is to go heavy on TikTok-style video and editing. TikTok made short, entertaining videos wildly popular, and to compete, both Instagram and Facebook responded by adding a similar video feature to their platforms. Take advantage of them. Video offers your practice exposure by helping it reach new accounts. It’s a winning strategy at the moment and can draw (especially on Instagram) more new viewers than creating hashtag-filled posts. 

Give it 6 Months 

You need a solid 6 months to determine if your social media campaign strategy is working or not. One month is not enough time, and neither is three. Be patient. It takes time to find a strategy that works.

Hold Off on Ads

Many practices have questions about running Facebook and Instagram ads and the answer is—don’t! At least not in the beginning. Don’t run any ads until you know that your organic strategy is working. Once you see it start to succeed, then put ad dollars behind it. 

Engagement rate 

Engagement is the second of a two-pronged approach to reaching new social media accounts. The first is to rely heavily on video and video editing. Follow this up with a high engagement rate and you’ll have a winning strategy. It’s not enough to get lots of “likes.” And just because you have numerous followers doesn’t mean people are seeing your content. What social media platforms reward is engagement. To drive it up, viewers need to comment on your content. And you, in turn, will need to respond to their comments. 

Plastic surgery practices are wise to invest in a social media strategy that eventually brings new patients through their doors. First, though, they need to know what this will cost, and they need to track their (ROI) to determine the campaign’s profitability. Doing social media right requires the dedicated efforts of a part-time employee or the hiring of an outside social media agency. Remember to track where your new patients come from, focus on video, give it 6 months, hold off on ads, and focus on replying to comments to drive your engagement rate which will help you reach new social media accounts and eventually turn a profit for your practice. PSP

Andrea Smith owns Smith Social Company, a social media agency dedicated to supporting specialty physician practices. She has a decade of experience in healthcare operations, physician relations, and referral management.

Is it possible for a plastic surgery practice to create a profitable social media campaign on its own? In a word, YES! And doing this is more important than ever. Today’s patients want to know, like, and trust their surgeon even before the consultation. And what better way to let a potential patient get to know their plastic surgeon than through video that reaches them on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, where they spend a good deal of their time engaging with content.

Designate a Part-Time Position 

Creating content (videos, pictures, graphics, and captions) that promotes your practice to thousands of would-be patients starts with designating a part-time social media position. You’ll need someone who can devote about one-quarter to one-half of their time solely to social media planning, creation, and management. This is key. Successful social media campaigns require focused attention from a staff member who isn’t overwhelmed with other responsibilities. If this isn’t possible, hiring a specialized social media agency is an option.  

Plan Ahead with a Proactive Social Media Strategy

Doing social media right will eventually pay dividends when new patients come into your practice. But it requires a proactive strategy. It’s not something that can be done well on the spur of the moment. Instead, your dedicated staff member has to plan your social media campaign—ideally one month ahead of time. This starts with a calendar, a brainstorming session, and plenty of note-taking. You’ll want to have a theme. Mix up the types of posts you create. Write down the days you’ll create static graphics or pictures, and the days that call for video. The goal is to vary your content to keep your audience interested. 

Schedule Time for Pictures and Video

Just as you schedule a time to see patients, you’ll also need to schedule a time for social media video and picture opportunities. This could mean anything from having someone record you performing surgery to talking directly to the camera about the benefits of a specific procedure. The important thing is that you make yourself and your staff available to the designated social media person for that all-important content creation piece of the puzzle. 

Use Canva to Create Social Media Content

Once video and pictures are shot, you’ll need to edit and package them in a way that promotes your practice’s brand and image. Canva is an online graphic design website that offers tools to create impressive-looking social media content. The fact that it’s user-friendly and inexpensive is a bonus. 

Use a Scheduling Tool

You’ll need to use the Facebook and Instagram business suite to schedule posts. All still content should be scheduled in advance on the calendar tool to automatically post on the designated date. (This removes the need for daily, manual posting which is not ideal.) Impromptu posts should be reserved for videos with trending audio that you can’t do ahead of time because you don’t know what’s going to be trending.

What’s Social Media Engagement

Advanced content creation and scheduling free up time to focus on doing the daily task of real-time engagement with your audience. Somebody should be interacting with people who comment on your posts. It’s not enough to have followers and “likes” because this doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of people are seeing your content. Facebook and Instagram also measure engagement, which means your viewers comment on your content and you respond to their comments. 

Actively Find Your Ideal Plastic Surgery Patient 

Another way to bring new patients into your practice is to actively find them in Facebook groups and interact with them. In order to find Facebook groups where your ideal patient is hanging out, you need to do a deep dive analysis into who your ideal patient is and figure out as many things about them as you can. Where do they like to eat dinner? What do they do for fun? How old are their kids? What do they do for a living? And then by looking at Facebook groups associated with the different attributes of your ideal patient, you would be able to then go into those groups and interact with them.

How to Interact in Groups

Once you are part of the Facebook groups where your ideal client hangs out, you’ll want to interact with them. Interacting in groups is one way to build social media engagement and bring new people to your brand. But it takes some finesse. It’s the same thing as interacting in real life. You would never walk up to someone in public and say, “Hey, I own a plastic surgery practice. Do you want to be my patient?” You would start out by commenting about something say, the weather, and they would respond. It’s a bit like courting. It’s building those relationships in a very organic way. The goal is to get to the point where they notice you are from a plastic surgery practice and if they have a question they can ask it or send you a message. 

You can create your own profitable social media campaign to bring in new patients. Today’s patients want to know, like, and trust their surgeon even before the consultation. And what better way to let a potential patient get to know than through video that reaches them on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, where they spend a good deal of their time engaging with content. PSP

Andrea Smith owns Smith Social Company, a social media agency dedicated to supporting specialty physician practices. She has a decade of experience in healthcare operations, physician relations, and referral management.

Patients find their plastic surgeon on social media, and a 2018 study published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal shows that physicians with the highest number of social media followers are associated with placing at the top page of a Google search. This top placement makes the physician appear as an authority in the field, and patients, in turn, choose them to perform their procedures. Meanwhile, other metrics like medical school ranking or years in practice do not seem as important to today’s consumers. 

Not only do patients use social media to search for a plastic surgeon, but they also use it to gauge whether they trust the surgeon before they step inside their practice. This is understandable when we consider that patients are showing a vulnerable part of their face or body and trusting the surgeon to not only fix it, but to look at them with nonjudgmental eyes and help them to achieve their ideal look, and love the body they’re in. 

Using video to build patient trust on Instagram

One of the best ways to build a relationship and trust with a patient ahead of time and engage effectively on social media is through video content on Instagram. It is a social media platform that offers great benefits to a plastic surgery practice. Instagram places a strong emphasis on video content, which is the fastest way to grow that know, like and trust factor. In addition, many of the potential plastic surgery patients fall into the demographic of users most likely to be on Instagram: Millennials and Gen Z. Statistica.com reports that 62% of Instagram users are aged 18 to 34, so it’s vital for practices to be on this platform to get in front of them while they’re young. Instagram can also reach some key potential patients in the 35 to 54 age range as the same report said 24% of Instagram users are in this age group. 

How to use Stories and Reels on Instagram

It’s advisable to focus on two types of Instagram posts for your practice when building patient trust. The first is called stories. A story uses raw footage. It is an opportunity to showcase a day-in-the-life or some other aspect of your practice. This is where you build relatability. Stories are not planned out but instead are impromptu videos. Stories are only visible for 24 hours on Instagram before they go away. 

On the other hand, Instagram reels are well-planned, edited, and professional videos. They can show a specific procedure, patient reveals, or before and after pictures. Another option for an Instagram reel is to go through the benefits of a specific procedure. Reels live forever on Instagram. 

Use Facebook to target your target patient

Facebook is another valuable social media platform for plastic surgery practices. All ages are on Facebook, including people in the age range of 35 to 51, which statistics released by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery show received 43% of all plastic surgery procedures. 

How to implement a social media plan

Plastic surgery practices have so much on their plates that doing social media correctly on their own is a challenge at best. However, it is undertaken, the two most important aspects of social media are to be consistent and to show up on video. From there, consider the following when working to build trust with potential plastic surgery patients: 

1. Who should be in charge: The person who should be in charge of social media is the practice manager, or whoever is in charge of print media and the website—social media can also be part of something they are overseeing. Again, taking on social media is an incredible challenge to most practices and sometimes they need to seek outside help. The test is whether they can handle posting to social media at least three times a week on their own and answer all of the comments or inbox messages. If this is overwhelming to the practice, it’s advisable to seek outside help. 
2. How much should you budget: Practices often wonder how much they should budget for social media marketing. This is where it is important to consider the return on investment, or ROI. In general, it is helpful to consider the average revenue from one patient. If a social media campaign can bring in at least one patient per month, then social media marketing more than pays for itself. The reality, though, is that regular social media posting to Instagram will bring in more than one patient each month. 

Marketing for plastic surgery practices is constantly changing. The reality in 2022, however, is that patients use social media to choose their surgeons and want to see their practitioner on camera to decide whether they’re trustworthy before they decide to come in for a consultation. Physicians with the highest number of social media followers rank at the top of Google searches and these top page rankings affect consumers’ choice of surgeon. We don’t know what the marketing landscape will look like a decade from now, but at the moment, plastic surgeons must adopt social media to grow their practices and meet patients where they are, which is, quite often, on Instagram. PSP

Andrea Smith owns Smith Social Company, a social media agency dedicated to supporting specialty physician practices. She has a decade of experience in healthcare operations, physician relations, and referral management.

Blurring the lines between beauty and reality has made it increasingly difficult for patients and providers to set expectations, an integral part of any consult.

In some cases, though, it’s the providers who are living in an alternate aesthetic reality, skewing patient expectations.

Read the full article at www.allure.com

It seemed like the cosmetic dermatology appointment of dreams: Patients could find “champagne and snacks” at the ready in the “luxurious and clean” atmosphere, while longstanding-acne made way for “tighter, smoother” skin with just one procedure.

That’s all from a glowing Yelp review of a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon. Too bad it’s totally fake.

Read the full article at mashable.com

Plastic surgeons used to lament that you never got to see their best work. For years the billboards for their profession were the train wrecks: nose jobs that rendered patients unrecognizable, face-lifts that doubled as wind tunnel simulations, cheeks stretched like taffy, eyes in a permanent state of surprise.

People have been happily getting discreet nips and tucks by expert surgeons for ages; it’s just that none of them were willing to announce it to the world. That is, until July 21 of this year, when Marc Jacobs posted a photo on Instagram captioned “Yesterday.”

Read the full article at www.townandcountrymag.com

With the rise of cosmetic surgery, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have become extremely powerful marketing tools, with surgeons filling their feeds with before-and-after photos, videos of clients, memes, skits – and of course, surgery.

From injectable treatments to BBL surgery – it seems like nothing is off limits. These days you can consent to having your procedure broadcasted to millions of people all over the world. And bar a couple of well-placed emojis, there is often little to no censorship involved.

Read the full article at www.mamamia.com